“Selwyn, whose constant flow of exquisite wit made him generally acceptable”

As described yesterday, on Christmas Eve in 1769 the brothers Patrick and Matthew Kennedy got drunk and stomped around the neighborhood of Westminter Bridge in London, clubbing people.

One of those people died: watchman George Bigby.

Within weeks, the Kennedys were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Matthew was about to step on the cart that would take him to the gallows when a reprieve arrived.

The brothers had a sister, Catherine or Kitty, who was one of London’s leading courtesans. (Many discussions of this case amalgamate Kitty Kennedy with another courtesan named Polly Kennedy, née Jones. There are some nice pictures of that woman, but I’m convinced by the historian Horace Bleackley that I shouldn’t use them because they show a different person.)

Kitty Kennedy’s closest gentleman friends were Lord Robert Spencer, brother of the Duke of Marlborough, and the Hon. John St. John, brother of Viscount Bolingbroke. Both men were members of Parliament. St. John, a barrister, actually testified at the brothers’ trial, claiming a prosecution witness had offered not to testify in exchange for £10; by implication, all the witnesses were dubious.

But Kitty had some prominent ex-lovers as well. And even more men who were won over by entreaties from her and her admirers. Among the aristocrats who publicly supported leniency for the Kennedys were the Duke of Manchester, until recently lord of the bedchamber to George III; the Earl of Carlisle; Viscount Palmerston; the Earl of Fife, who was in the British House of Commons because his peerage was Irish; and Sir George Savile, M.P.

But the Kennedy family’s most active champion was George Selwyn (1719–1791, shown above), yet another member of Parliament. Not because Selwyn was enamoured of Kitty Kennedy—he was gay. And not because he was against hanging—Selwyn was notorious for his fetish for watching people die. Rather, Kitty Kennedy’s admirers seem to have convinced Selwyn that her brothers were not the sort of young men who should be hanged.

There was an obvious class prejudice behind the campaign to keep the Kennedys from being executed. They weren’t street thugs, people said; they worked in an auction house, and had a sister who was a social celebrity. And hadn’t Matthew suffered enough in thinking he was about to be hanged?

Of course, other people thought the Kennedys had been drunk, cruel, and violent, and under the law of the day deserved their death sentence, even if only one could have struck the fatal blow.

Horace Walpole was among those who helped push for leniency while reveling in the insider nature of the campaign. For instance, sometime in 1770 Walpole wrote to Selwyn:

After you was gone last night, I heard it whispered about the room that a bad representation had been made at the Queen’s house against the unhappy young man. Do not mention this, as it might do hurt; but try privately, without talking of it, if you cannot get some of the ladies to mention the cruelty of the case; or what do you think of a hint by the German women [i.e., certain ladies in waiting], if you can get at them?

In his memoirs Walpole later described the case this way:

Two Kennedys, young Irishmen, had been charged with, and one of them had been condemned for, the murder of a watchman in a drunken riot. They had a handsome sister, who was kept by two young men of quality.

Out of friendship to them, Mr. George Selwyn had prevailed on six or seven of the jury to make an affidavit that, if some circumstances, which had really been neglected by the counsel for the prisoners, had appeared on the trial, they would not have brought in their verdict murder.

Mr. Selwyn applied for mercy, and the young convict was reprieved; but when the report was made in Council, Lord Mansfield prevailed to have him ordered for execution.

Mr. Selwyn, whose constant flow of exquisite wit made him generally acceptable, applied in person to the King, and represented that Lord Rochford, the Secretary of State, had under his hand assured the pardon; that such an act had always been deemed pardon, and that the prisoner had been made acquainted with it. The King immediately renewed his promise, the criminal was ordered for transportation…

That commutation was made on 17 April. Matthew Kennedy was put on a ship bound for America.

TOMORROW: Shipboard conditions.

“The duchess’s trial for bigamy commenced…”

I recently enjoyed the History of Parliament’s recounting of the 1776 trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh (1721–1788, shown here) for bigamy.

The legal issue, which determined where a couple of large inheritances would go, was: Had Chudleigh been legally married to (though long estranged from) the third Earl of Bristol in 1744? Or, based on a marriage in 1769, was she the legal widow of the second Duke of Kingston?

Because this matter involved the wife of at least one peer, it was tried before the House of Lords.

The webpage says:

…the duchess’s trial for bigamy commenced in Westminster Hall on 15 April 1776. It quickly became the event of the season. Horace Walpole was expectant, as he was sure ‘her impudence will operate in some singular manner’, and he provided his correspondents with detailed and mocking commentary. He had to admit though that ‘The Duchess-Countess has raised my opinion of her understanding… for she has behaved so sensibly and with so little affectation’. . . .

The moralist Hannah More was less impressed by the spectacle. ‘You will imagine the bustle of five thousand people getting into one hall’, she wrote to a friend. ‘There was a great deal of ceremony, a great deal of splendour, and a great deal of nonsense’. Of the duchess’s performance, More pronounced ‘Surely there never was so thorough an actress’, and her friend the actor David Garrick even commented that the duchess ‘has so much out-acted him, it is time for him to leave the stage’.

The House of Lords reached a unanimous verdict on Lady Bristol or Lady Kingston. However, as Lord Chief Justice Mansfield had predicted, she pled her privilege as a lady and escaped punishment, beyond having to travel Europe with a large fortune.

The History of Parliament page comes to a fitting close: “She died in France on 26 August 1788, from bursting a blood vessel while in a rage after hearing she had lost a legal action.”

“Somerset v. Steuart @ 250” via the A.P.S., 30 Nov.

On Wednesday, 30 November, the American Philosophical Society will host a panel discussion on the topic “Somerset v. Steuart @ 250: A Virtual Roundtable Discussion.”

The event description says:

The Somerset v. Steuart trial of 1772 has emerged as an event of much discussion in the history of transatlantic antislavery. Scholars have debated the decision’s importance and centrality to the emancipatory impulses in the British Atlantic, and, more recently, weighed its possible role in the coming of the American Revolution. Some have argued that Lord Mansfield’s decision in James Somerset’s favor was a central, even epochal event, while others maintain that North Americans scarcely noticed the decision.

The panelists are top-notch historians of slavery, law, and politics in the Revolutionary era:

• David Waldstreicher, moderator, teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the author of In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820; Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution; and Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. His new book, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, will be published in March 2023.
• Holly Brewer, Burke Professor of American History at the University of Maryland, is finishing a book that examines the origins of American slavery in larger political and ideological debates, tentatively entitled Slavery & Sovereignty in Early America and the British Empire. She is also Principal Investigator for a documentary editing project called “Slavery, Law, and Power.”
• Christopher Brown is a professor of History at Columbia University, principally studying the British empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His books include Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism and, with Philip D. Morgan, Arming Slaves: Classical Times to the Modern Age.
• Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina and The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, which won the Frederick Douglass, Avery Craven, James Rawley, and SHEAR Best Book prizes.
• Alan Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His ten books include William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early Republic and The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, both winners of the Pulitzer Prize.

To register for this online event, start at this page.

The painting above, courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg, shows Charles Steuart around 1785.

“Your Countrymen must fail in a contest with this great and powerfull people”

Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s mission to London in 1774 was a failure after its first week, and he didn’t know it.

Quincy met with the prime minister on 19 November. Four days later the secretary of state, Lord Dartmouth, told Thomas Hutchinson that Lord North had concluded Josiah Quincy, Jr., was “a bad, insidious man, designing to be artful without abilities to conceal his design.”

Hutchinson wrote back to Robert Auchmuty in Massachusetts, “If the remarks which Ld. North made upon the first visit are truly reported, there will probably be no second visit to cause a dispute.” You think?

Dartmouth went into his own meeting with Quincy the next day. It didn’t go any better. The earl had also heard “Quincy intended to go to Holland,” seeking military supplies or other support from one of Britain’s rivals, which provided another reason to mistrust the young attorney from Massachusetts.

In that same week John Williams set up one other meeting for Quincy with a royal official: Corbyn Morris, a long-time Commissioner of His Majesty’s Customs. On 22 November, Quincy recorded in his journal:

Dined with Corbin Morris Esqr., one of the Commissioners of the Customs, (supposed framer of the annual ministerial budget, being a choice friend of the Ministry) in company with one of the officers of the Treasury and Jonathan [sic] Williams Esqr. Mr. Morris was sensible, intelligent and very conversible. The who[le] conversation was on American affairs. He enter[ed] largely into the claims, the rights and the duty of Parliament. He spoke as might be expected. I observed a remarkable conformity of sentiments between him and Lord North, and an equally observable similarity of language. Mr. Morris expatiated largely upon the infinite resources of Commerce[,] wealth and power of the English nation. I heard him.

The following address to me was a little singular, not to say laughable—but I never smiled. “Mr. Quincy you are a man &c. (flummery). You have seen some of the ministry and have heard more of the disposition of [the] administration. You find that they have no inclination to injure, much less to oppress the Colonies. They have no wish, but that of seeing the Americans free and happy. You must be sensible of the right of Parliament to legislate for the Colonies, and of the power of the nation to enforce their laws. No power in Europe ever provoke[d] the resentment or bid defiance to the Powers of this Island, but they were made to repent of it. You must know your Countrymen must fail in a contest with this great and powerfull people. Now as you find how inclined Administration are to lenity and mildness, you should, you ought to write to your friends this intelligence, and endeavour to influence them to their duty. I don’t doubt your influence would be very great with them, and you would by this means be doing a lasting service to the Country.” ! ! !

Morris was apparently trying to give Quincy straight talk: the Crown government was constitutionally sound, beneficent, powerful, determined, and—for a limited time—willing to be lenient. But Quincy found the warning “laughable.” He even appears to have been suspicious that Lord North had said much the same thing.

Quincy might also have felt that Morris’s suggestion he use his “influence” to win over other Massachusetts Whigs might be followed by a financial reward for his “lasting service.” Quincy was already “upon my guard against the temptations and bribery of Administration.” One man in Massachusetts even told his sister that he ”loved money too much, to be trusted at a Court where every thing is bought and sold.” So he was determined not to bend his position.

Quincy remained in London, talking to local supporters of the American cause. But he had no more access to people who were actually in power. In early December Lord Chief Justice Mansfield told another official “Quincy had desired to see him, but he would not admit him.”

In early March 1775, Josiah Quincy, Jr., sailed home. By the time his ship arrived off the coast of Massachusetts, the province was at war and he was dying.

TOMORROW: More failure of communication.

“His Ldship. did not suppose he would say this was a misrepresentation”

I’ve quoted Josiah Quincy, Jr.’s descriptions of his meetings in November 1774 with Lord North, the prime minister, and the Earl of Dartmouth, the secretary of state for North America.

So far as I know, we don’t have accounts of those discussions directly from those ministers or their aides. But we do have what former governor Thomas Hutchinson wrote after hearing from Lord Dartmouth and others, and it presents a very different picture of the conversations.

Of course Hutchinson was an interested party, in that one of Quincy’s main talking-points in London was that the former governor had been lying about Massachusetts and Boston. So Hutchinson was probably pleased to hear that the ministers showed no sympathy for that complaint. On the other hand, he would have recorded any hint that the ministers were sympathetic, so I think we can take Hutchinson’s reports as accurate.

From the start, it appears, Lord North and Lord Dartmouth listened to things Quincy said and oh-so-politely tried to correct him. For example, Dartmouth gave Hutchinson this account of Quincy’s meeting with Lord North:

[Quincy said] the people of the Massachusetts must have been much wronged by the misrepresentations which had been made from time to time to the Ministry, and which had occasioned the late measures: that there was a general desire of reconciliation, and that he thought three or four persons on the part of the Kingdom, and as many on the part of the Colonies, might easily settle the matter.

Lord North said to him, he had been moved by no informations nor representations: it was their own Acts and Doings, (of which he had been furnished with attested authentic copies,) denying the authority of Parliament over them. His Ldship. did not suppose he would say this was a misrepresentation.

But of course that’s what Quincy was saying, and would say again.

Quincy wrote: “We spoke considerably upon the sentiments of Americans of the rights claimed by Parliament to tax.” Lord North’s position on that was, in modern terms, Parliament’s sovereignty under the British constitution doesn’t care about your sentiments.

(In this same week Lord North was reading Gov. Thomas Gage’s suggestion that the ministry suspend some of the Coercive Acts as a pragmatic measure. The prime minister told Hutchinson, “He did not know what General Gage meant by suspending the Acts: there was no suspending an Act of Parliament.”)

To Lord Dartmouth, Quincy suggested that the Lord Chief Justice (shown above, as painted by John Singleton Copley) could help to mediate the dispute; “he had the highest opinion of Lord Mansfield, and he did not doubt his Lordship was capable of projecting a way to reconcile the Kingdom and the Colonies.”

The secretary of state replied that “he believed Lord M. was fully of opinion that the proceedings in Massachusetts Bay were treasonable.” There had been serious discussions about that in the wake of the Boston Tea Party. 

Rather than take the hint that a legal authority he’d just praised didn’t approve of his party’s actions, Quincy responded that “he knew the people in N.E. had no idea that they were guilty of Treason.”

Once again, the government minister might have replied that what the people in New England thought they were doing did not carry the legal weight of what the Lord Chief Justice thought.

TOMORROW: Invoking the lieutenant governor’s name.

Calls for Papers on the Somerset Case and Much More

Several seminar series and conferences have put out their calls for papers for the 2022-23 academic year, including:

• David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society seminar series (deadline 10 June)
• British Group of Early American Historians’ Conference at Cardiff University, 2–3 September (deadline 15 June)
• Washington Area Early American Seminar at the University of Maryland (deadline 17 June)
• Providence College Seminar on the History of Early America (deadline 1 July)

That’s not supposed to be a comprehensive list, just a sign of what’s in season.

One call for papers that particularly caught my eye, however, came from the American Philosophical Society. It’s for a conference on “Somerset v. Steuart @ 250: Facts, Interpretations, and Legacies," to be held on 1–2 December:

In recent years, the Somerset v. Steuart trial of 1772 has emerged as an event of much discussion in the history of transatlantic antislavery. Scholars have debated the decision’s importance and centrality to the emancipatory impulses in the British Atlantic, and, more recently, its role in the outbreak of the American Revolution. Some have argued that Lord Mansfield’s decision in James Somerset’s favor was a central, even epochal event, while others maintain that North Americans scarcely noticed the decision. With the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the trial upon us, the David Center is convening a scholarly symposium to continue this conversation and offer fresh appraisals of the causes, nature, and consequences of the decision.

The program committee seeks paper proposals from scholars in all fields to assess what we have learned and how we might interpret events before, during, and after the 1772 decision. We seek to evaluate the origins of the trial and to examine the question of how important the trial was to the momentous changes of the period, Potential topics and themes include but are not limited to:

• New analysis on the causes and nature of the Somerset decision in 1772.
• Exploration of the impact and reception of the Somerset decision.
• The direct and indirect effects of the decision on the lives of the enslaved and enslavers.
• The influence of the decision on the law, the empire, the politics, and the African diaspora within the British Empire and beyond it.
• The importance or unimportance of ideas, of law, and of courts.
• The historiography of the Somerset case.
• Memory and public commemoration of the decision, both historically and contemporaneously.
• The current use and depiction of the case in educational materials, public debates, the media, and sites of public history.
• The role of James Somerset himself and other African actors.

We will meet on Thursday and Friday, December 1-2, 2022, for online and in-person sessions, all of which will be open to the public. Papers will be distributed in advance. Participants should be committed to read all the papers and to serve as a discussion leader for another session.

Ultimately the conference organizers hope to produce a book of essays published through the David Center and the University of Pennsylvania Press.

People proposing a paper should send send an abstract of 250 words, a one-page c.v., and a brief cover letter about how this topic fits into their research through Interfolio by 15 June. 

“I suppose they have all read it years ago”

In defending himself against the Crown’s charge of seditious libel in July 1777, the Rev. John Horne wanted to show it was reasonable of him to write two years before that Americans had been “inhumanly murdered by the king’s troops at Lexington and Concord.”

As a radical political activist, Horne probably also wanted to get the evidence behind that belief out to the public.

The Crown authorities, meanwhile, wanted to squelch Horne and his message.

One of Horne’s sources was a deposition signed in April 1775 by Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould, then a wounded prisoner in American hands. The trial record shows Horne’s struggle to get Gould’s words out in court over the obstacles of his prosecutor, Attorney General Edward Thurlow (shown here), and the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield.

Horne’s questioning of Gould continued like this:

I shall ask you no questions that you dislike; give me a hint if there is any one you wish to decline—Did you make any affidavit?

Yes, I did.

Will you please to read that? [Giving the witness the Public Advertiser, May 31, 1775.] I believe that to be the exact substance of the affidavit that I made.

Lord Mansfield. It cannot be read without the Attorney-General consents to it.

Attorney General. I don’t consent.

Lord Mansfield. If he consents to it, I have no objection.

Mr. Horne. May I give it to the jury?

Lord Mansfield. No; I suppose they have all read it years ago.

Mr. Horne. My lord, that is my misfortune that it is so long ago. [Mr. Horne begins to read it.]

Lord Mansfield. You must not read it.

Mr. Home. I have proved the publication by the printer.

Lord Mansfield. It will have a different consequence, if you only mean to prove that there was such an affidavit published. If you mean to make that use of it, then you may produce the affidavit, or have it read.—If you mean to prove the contents of it, they must come from the witness, and then you will have a right to have it read.

Mr. Horne. I mean both to prove the contents true, and the publication of the affidavit: that indeed, I have already proved.

Lord Mansfield. Then you may read the affidavit, if you make use of the publication of it.

Mr. Horne. I make use of both; that it was so published, and charged, and that it is true. “The Public Advertiser, Wednesday, May 31st, 1775.” [The affidavit read.]

Gould’s deposition still wasn’t included in the published trial record.

The former lieutenant agreed that the published text was accurate, but he reminded the jury he had said those things “at the time I was wounded and taken prisoner.”

Gould then went on to testify about how he and other officers marching to Lexington could see and hear the Middlesex County militia mobilizing around them. He talked about hearing “alarm guns,” even “cannon.” (“Did you say cannon?” asked Lord Mansfield.)

A juryman asked for clarification: “Pray who did the alarm guns belong to; to the Americans or our corps?” Gould affirmed those were signals from the provincials to each other.

The testimony that Horne elicited thus portrayed the Massachusetts populace as turning out for a military fight. He decided not to call Lord Percy, then in the courtroom, to add any details and rested his case.

Attorney General Thurlow then delivered a long legal argument, calling no witnesses. Chief Justice Mansfield summed up the case, particularly citing Gould’s testimony.

The jury took ninety minutes to decide the Rev. John Horne was guilty of seditious libel. He spent the next year in prison.

“Were you present at Lexington and Concord?”

The Rev. John Horne (later John Horne Tooke) was one of Britain’s political radicals in the 1770s.

He started the decade as a minister allied with John Wilkes. They quarreled, and he resigned his pulpit in order to study law (though eventually the bar wouldn’t accept him on the excuse that he had taken holy orders).

When London received the first word of the Revolutionary War breaking out, Horne immediately criticized the royal government. He even announced that he was raising money for the families of Americans “murdered by the king’s troops at Lexington and Concord.” He had fully adopted the version of the first day of the war propagated by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

The Crown brought Horne into court on the charge of seditious libel for using the word “murdered.” On 4 July 1777, coincidentally one year after the Declaration of Independence, he went on trial in London with Lord Chief Justice Mansfield presiding. A detailed record of the trial was made and published many times since.

Horne tried to call Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State, and Gen. Thomas Gage as witnesses. When the judges unsurprisingly didn’t allow that, he called Edward Thornton Gould, a former lieutenant in the 4th Regiment.

That young, wealthy officer had been wounded and captured in the battle. While in American hands, Gould signed a deposition that I quoted way back here.

In describing the skirmish at Lexington, Gould said, “which party fired first I can not exactly say.” About Concord he stated, “the provincials came down upon us, upon which we engaged and gave the first fire.” While this was far from supporting the charge of “murdering,” it differed from most army officers and Gen. Gage’s official report in not blaming the provincials for firing first.

At the trial, Horne, representing himself, questioned Gould this way:

Did you in the year 1775 serve in a regiment of foot belonging to his majesty?

I did.

Were you present at Lexington and Concord on the 19th of April 1775?

I was.

How came you to be there?

As a subaltern officer, ordered there.

Ordered by whom?

General Gage.

At what time did you receive those orders?

I don’t recollect immediately the time.

Was it on the 19th, 18th, or 17th of April?

I believe it was on the 18th in the evening.

Did you receive them personally from general Gage?

No such thing.

Whom then?

From the adjutant of the regiment.

When did you set out from Boston for Lexington?

I cannot exactly say the time in the morning, but it was very early, two or three o’clock.

That is in the night in April, was it dark?

It was.

Did you march with drums beating?

No, we did not.

Did you march as silently as you could?

There were not any particular orders given for silence.

Was it observed?

No, it was not observed, not particularly by me.

Were you taken prisoner at Lexington or Concord, or either of them?

At the place called Monottama, in my return from Lexington.

Then Horne turned to introducing the testimony that Gould had sworn to when he was a wounded prisoner.

TOMORROW: Getting testimony on the record.

“Deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution”

Yesterday I shared more than a thousand words about the American Revolution from Nikole Hannah-Jones’s opening essay in “The 1619 Project,” as originally published by the New York Times.

Most of those words don’t seem to have produced any objections, at least on factual grounds.

Almost all the ire focused on these 135 words, particularly the first three sentences:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if some of the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue.

I’ll discuss the first sentence tomorrow.

I see more problems with the next two sentences, about anti-slavery views in Britain. The abolition movement in that country was still in its infancy, not strong enough to make the body politic “deeply conflicted.” We might well find individual writers who felt “conflicted” in an intellectual or psychological sense, opposing the brutality of the slave trade and chattel slavery while still thinking the empire required it, at least in the short term. But it took decades for seriously deep political fissures to appear.

The British high court’s 1772 decision in Somerset v. Steuart did limit slavery—but only in Britain. While that case did become an inspiration and precedent for later anti-slavery advocates, Chief Justice Lord Mansfield made clear that his legal ruling didn’t have force over in “the Western Hemisphere.”

A few British writers followed the Somerset decision with calls to limit slavery further. In 1774 the Rev. John Wesley published Thoughts Upon Slavery, which advocated (in a footnote) an end to the slave trade and reform of labor practices in the Caribbean islands. The following year, the nine-year-old, policy-free letters between the formerly enslaved Ignatius Sancho and the bestselling novelist Laurence Sterne were published. Those were indeed part of “growing calls to abolish the slave trade” in 1770s London, but those calls were growing only because they started from nearly nothing—basically Granville Sharp’s 1769 A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery.

Left out of the paragraph above is how in the decade before the war the legislatures of two large North American colonies—Massachusetts and Virginia—voted to end the transatlantic slave trade into their ports. The royal governors vetoed those measures. Thus, the parts of the British Empire furthest along to actually barring the slave trade were two of the provinces kicking up the most resistance to the Crown. And the Massachusetts assembly repeated its vote after the Somerset decision.

Of course, some Western Hemisphere slaveowners didn’t like how the Somerset case ended. Caribbean planters had bankrolled Steuart’s defense because they worried about an adverse ruling. Despite Mansfield’s insistence, some continued to fret about a slippery-slope trend that could eventually limit the profits from their slave-labor sugar plantations.

How strong was that worry for North American colonists? In 2005 Alfred W. and Ruth G. Blumrosen wrote Slave Nation: An Unflinching Look at the Racism that Inspired the American Revolution, arguing that “racist fury over [the Somerset case] united the Northern and Southern colonies and convinced them to fight for independence.” (Their son Steven Blumrosen is credited as coauthor of the paperback edition, which might have been revised.) In 2014 Gerald Horne echoed that argument in The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America and emphasized white Americans’ fears about uprisings of the enslaved before and during the war.

All three of those authors were respected professors, though they were working outside their core specialties; the Blumrosens were experts on discrimination law while most of Horne’s books are about nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. Both titles received early praise for raising provocative and important questions about the Revolution and some prominent mainstream reviews.

In most historical journals, however, reviewers criticized the lack of evidence that leaders of the American resistance showed so much concern about the Somerset case, or any concern at all. Some pointed out how the authors had misinterpreted their eighteenth-century sources, or read backward from later abolitionist writers. However, no one argued that these books were so flawed that we should reject them entirely. They were part of an ongoing historiographical debate.

Hannah-Jones’s essay in “The 1619 Project” appears to have relied on Horne’s argument and possibly the Blumrosens’, among others. However, she stopped short of adopting their position that fear of an end to slavery because of British policy and/or uprisings was the cause, or even the main cause, of the American Revolution.

Nevertheless, some critics of “The 1619 Project” insist on misreading the paragraph above that way.

TOMORROW: Actual words.

When Wartime Riots Paralyzed London

On 2 June 1780, as I described yesterday, a crowd of over 50,000 people surrounded Parliament while Lord George Gordon presented a petition demanding a return to strictures on Catholics.

The House of Commons dismissed that petition, and the crowd dispersed from that part of London. But that evening people attacked the embassy of Sardinia. They destroyed a chapel connected to the embassy of Bavaria. They attacked neighborhoods of prominent Catholics. Sir John Fielding’s Bow Street Runners and other authorities arrested some rioters and locked them in Newgate Prison.

The next day, 3 June, larger crowds rampaged through Moorfields, a neighborhood where a lot of Irish workers had settled. A mob attacked Newgate Prison, freed fellow rioters and other prisoners, and then basically destroyed the complex. Then people attacked other prisons, and other embassies. They attacked the home of Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, who had supported the more liberal law about Catholics.

Violence continued for days, spilling well beyond the original grievances. On 7 June, there was a concerted assault on the Bank of England, stopped only by an upper-class militia unit and regular troops. All in all, the property damage cost up to £180,000, which many historians say was far more than the city of Paris suffered during the whole French Revolution. (I’d like to see the comparable figures, but that’s what they say.)

On that 7 June, the British government clamped down on the rioters with force. It brought in regular troops, including the Horse Guards and Foot Guards, as well as militias from nearby counties—12,000 armed men in all. Soldiers killed nearly 300 people and arrested 450, pacifying the city after a week of chaos. The government put scores of men on trial and sentenced dozens to death for acts of violence and theft, though not all those sentences were carried out.

London’s upper and middle classes, scared by the violence, supported such harsh measures. The Crown fined the Lord Mayor for not reading the Riot Act to the crowds earlier. A former Lord Mayor, John Wilkes, led troops against the rioters, ruining his reputation as a champion of the people and thus his political career. Another radical Whig, the Earl of Shelburne, responded to the uprising by proposing a national police force, but nothing came of that.

As for Lord George Gordon, he was locked up in the Tower and tried for treason, but acquitted. Nevertheless, the disturbances were named after him: the Gordon Riots. He continued to get in trouble with the authorities, eventually locked up again for insulting Marie Antoinette of France and the British legal system. By then he had converted to Judaism—beard, circumcision, and all—and he became quite a curiosity while locked up in the rebuilt Newgate Prison.

The unrest had at least one effect on the American Revolution. Early in 1780 Spain and Britain had started secret negotiations which could have led to Spain pulling its support for the new U.S. of A. The riots convinced Spanish diplomats that Lord North’s government might soon fall, so they ended the talks.

The B.B.C. radio program In Our Time recently hosted a discussion about the Gordon Riots, available as a podcast. The London Historians offers an introduction to the unrest by Prof. Jerry White in P.D.F. form. The episode was also fodder for nineteenth-century British novelists: Maria Edgeworth with Harrington and Charles Dickens with Barnaby Rudge. But of course, unlike the Stamp Act riots in North America and the storming of the Bastille in Paris, the Gordon Riots didn’t lead to revolution.

Lord George Gordon’s Petition to Parliament

The engraving above shows Lord George Gordon, youngest son of the Duke of Gordon, delivering a petition to Parliament in 1780. That document came with over 400 pages of signatures, and there were other copies circulating. Estimates of the total number of people to sign Gordon's petition run as high as 120,000 Britons. In eighteenth-century society, that’s a mind-boggling number.

What did all those people want from Parliament? They asked the British government to repeal the Papists Act of 1778, which had lifted some of the legal restrictions on Roman Catholics imposed after the Glorious Revolution. Not that the new law allowed Catholics to vote or hold office in Britain, but they could now, for example, buy real estate.

One impetus for the new law was the British government’s need to recruit more Irish Catholics into the army to fight the American War. Previously men had to abjure their Catholic faith to become redcoats. After 1778, they simply had to swear allegiance to the Hanoverian king. Lord Mansfield, Britain’s Chief Justice, was one of the main proponents of this reform.

As for Gordon, he was a former Royal Navy lieutenant and Member of Parliament. In the House of Commons he had opposed Lord North’s policies toward the American colonies, but he didn’t get along with the opposition parties, either.

In 1779 Gordon formed the Protestant Association because he believed that British Catholics remained a threat who had to be suppressed. By then two of Europe’s big Catholic powers, France and Spain, had joined the Americans' war against the British Crown. Gordon and many of his supporters suspected that people in the government too sympathetic to the Catholics had brought on the war and were endangering the Empire.

Now we like to think of the American Revolution as connected to freedom of religion. Indeed, it pushed American society in that direction. Even in Massachusetts, where the Congregationalist establishment lasted until the 1830s, the war ended with a Catholic Church in Boston. Virginia adopted Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786. And we agree that’s a Good Thing, right?

But in the 1770s, the political lines were drawn differently. Gordon supported political reform within the British Empire, and he saw Catholicism as the worst form of old-fashioned despotism, so he didn’t want Catholics to get any closer to power. Meanwhile, Mansfield opposed the American rebels but was liberal toward religious minorities within the Empire.

On 2 June 1780, about 50,000 supporters of the Protestant Association gathered in St. George’s Field, an open area in South London. (Eleven years before, a rally for John Wilkes at that place had ended in bloodshed.) Many in the crowd blue cockades, the movement’s symbol. Some carried banners that read “No Popery.”

Lord George Gordon led his supporters on a march to Westminster to present their huge petition, as shown above. The crowd grew even larger as it moved through the city streets.

With his genteel status, Gordon made it into the House of Commons and presented the Protestant Association petition. Outside, thousands of people surrounded the Parliament building, roughing up some peers and vandalizing carriages.

Members of Parliament voted to dismiss the petition, 192-6. Gordon went home disappointed but not surprised. Soldiers arrived and dispersed the crowd. The government thought the crisis had passed.

TOMORROW: It hadn’t.

“All those parts and fire are extinguished”

On 24 Aug 1767, the British politician Thomas Whately wrote to former boss George Grenville about gossip he’d heard from yet another Member of Parliament, Grey Cooper:

He told me that the Chancellor of the Exchequer [Charles Townshend, shown here] having been not well of a long time, and he observing that he looked still worse a few days ago, he advised Lady Greenwich [Townshend’s wife, made a baroness just days before] to send for a physician;

she at first said that Mr. Townshend’s disorder was only lowness of spirits; but at last called in Sir William Duncan [doctor to King George III], who has pronounced it to be a slow fever of the putrid kind; from which he does not apprehend any danger at present, but says that it is a disorder liable to so many accidents that he cannot answer for the event.

Mr. Townshend yesterday kept his bed, but I believe rather because he was desired than because he was obliged to do so.

The fever turned out to be more dangerous than Dr. Duncan guessed. Two hundred fifty years ago today, Townshend died.

Late that month, Horace Walpole reacted:

But our comet is set too! Charles Townshend is dead. All those parts and fire are extinguished; those volatile salts are evaporated; that first eloquence of the world is dumb! that duplicity is fixed, that cowardice terminated heroically. He joked on death as naturally as he used to do on the living, and not with the affectation of philosophers, who wind up their works with sayings which they hope to have remembered. With a robust person he had always a menacing constitution. He had had a fever the whole summer, recovered as it was thought, relapsed, was neglected, and it turned to an incurable putrid fever.

The Opposition expected that the loss of this essential pin would loosen the whole frame [i.e., bring down the government]; but it had been hard, if both his life and death were to be pernicious to the Administration. He had engaged to betray the latter to the former, as I knew early, and as Lord Mansfield has since declared. I therefore could not think the loss of him a misfortune. His seals were immediately offered to Lord North, who declined them. The Opposition rejoiced; but they ought to have been better acquainted with one educated in their own school. Lord North has since accepted the seals—and the reversion of his father’s pension.

While that eccentric genius, Charles Townshend, whom no system could contain, is whirled out of existence, our more artificial meteor, Lord Chatham, seems to be wheeling back to the sphere of business—at least his health is declared to be re-established; but he has lost his adorers, the mob, and I doubt the wise men will not travel after his light.

Townshend’s program for raising revenue from the American colonies, the Townshend duties, was due to go into effect on 20 November. Now the architect of that policy was gone.

TOMORROW: Assessing Charles Townshend.

Thomas Hutchinson Meets Dido Belle

The movie Belle is now in theaters, I’m sharing former Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson’s impression of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the young woman of (some) African descent who inspired that drama.

This is from Hutchinson’s diary entry for 19 Aug 1779, when he dined with Lord Chief Justice Mansfield and his family in England. Dido Belle had grown up in that family, receiving a genteel though limited education. It’s notable that she didn’t dine with the family on this occasion and had responsibility for some of the farming operation.

As usual, Hutchinson grasped many of the implications of the situations yet carefully deferred to his aristocratic host’s sensibilities in what issues he raised.

A Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies, and after coffee, walked with the company in the gardens, one of the young ladies having her arm within the other. She had a very high cap, and her wool was much frizzled in her neck, but not enough to answer the large curls now in fashion. She is neither handsome nor genteel—pert enough. I knew her history before, but my Lord mentioned it again. Sir Jno. Lindsay having taken her mother prisoner in a Spanish vessel, brought her to England, where she was delivered of this girl, of which she was then with child, and which was taken care of by Lord M., and has been educated by his family. He calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. He knows he has been reproached for shewing a fondness for her—I dare say not criminal.

A few years ago [in 1771-1772] there was a cause before his Lordship bro’t by a Black [James Somerset] for recovery of his liberty. A Jamaica planter being asked what judgment his Ldship would give? “No doubt,” he answered, “he will be set free, for Lord Mansfield keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family.” She is a sort of Superintendent over the dairy, poultry yard, &c., which we visited, and she was called upon by my Lord every minute for this thing and that, and shewed the greatest attention to everything he said.

I took occasion to mention that all the Americans who had brought Blacks had, as far as I knew, relinquished their property in them, and rather agreed to give them wages, or suffered them to go free. His Ldship remarked that there had been no determination that they were free, the judgment (meaning the case of Somerset) went no further than to determine the Master had no right to compel the slave to go into a foreign country, &c. I wished to have entered into a free colloquium, and to have discovered, if I am capable of it, the nice distinctions he mast have had in his mind, and which would not make it equally reasonable to restrain the Master from exercising any power whatever, as the power of sending the servant abroad; but I imagined such an altercation would rather be disliked, and forbore.

As Hutchinson tells Dido Belle’s story, Capt. Lindsay wasn’t necessarily her father—but most people had no trouble saying he was.

The Somerset legal case that Hutchinson referred to has a Massachusetts connection: Somerset’s owner, the Customs official Charles Steuart, had been posted in Boston in 1769 just before returning to Britain with a slave he’d purchased years before in Virginia. Hutchinson had probably met Steuart and might even have seen Somerset at work. But because he was just another enslaved servant, he probably didn’t prompt the attention that Hutchinson gave to Dido Belle.

Belle’s Boston Premiere, 4 May

A new British movie set in the eighteenth century will be previewed on Sunday, 4 May, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Belle was inspired by the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804), daughter of an enslaved African woman and Capt. John Lindsay of the Royal Navy. She was raised in England by a great-uncle, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who issued the ruling in the Somerset case that made slavery unenforceable in England.

The painting above shows Belle and her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, also raised by the Lord Chief Justice and his wife. Though at one time interpreted as a young woman and her servant, the picture is now recognized as showing two free cousins, though one has higher social status than the other.

The movie explores Dido Belle’s life in England, living in a household at the top of society and yet in a society with wealth based in significant part on racial slavery. It posits (as people did then) that Belle influenced her great-uncle’s thinking about slavery and race.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw stars as Dido Belle. Lord Mansfield is played by Tom Wilkinson, which is a very good sign, and his wife by Emily Watson. The Museum of Fine Arts screening, which is free but requires passes, will be followed by a panel discussion and question period.